ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe LGA 1155 ATX Motherboard Review

Power Consumption and Conclusion

Power Consumption

The P8Z77-V Deluxe consumed about 36 percent more power in idle and about 10 percent more power under load conditions against it's micro ATX counterpart. This really isn't a fair comparison because the P8Z77-V Deluxe has a couple more hardware components and is geared toward different types of users. This board's power management features weren't tested during our review, but it would have been simple to adjust the board's CPU wattage via the Ai Suite II or UEFI BIOS.

Performance

Evaluating a motherboard's overall features and performance results from synthetic and real-world settings is never easy. There are so many variables to consider when you objectively look at two boards side-by-side to determine a clear winner. Our head-to-head matchup between the G1.Sniper.M3 and P8Z77-V Deluxe wasn't an "apples to apples" competition, but it showed what users can get from different micro ATX and ATX motherboards that are designed for different types of users. The P8Z77-V Deluxe lead the way in almost every statistical category we use for benchmarking our motherboards. We've had alot of success testing boards using the Z77 chipset as well so the performance results weren't really that big of a surprise to us. What was surprising was how flexible the P8Z77-V Deluxe is between being a motherboard that's great for multi-tasking and productivity operations as well as high-definition PC gaming. I only wish we had a couple GTX 680s to test how well it handles SLI with triple monitors and max game settings at higher resolutions.

There are several other benefits to owning the P8Z77-V Deluxe like the addition of two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots that support quad-GPU SLI and CrossfireX graphics configurations. This board also has multiple controllers for managing its four SATA 6GB/s and four SATA 3GB/s ports. RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 is also available on two SATA GB/s ports that are managed by the Z77 chipset. Let's not forget ASUS's second-gen SSD caching feature that uses four SATA 6GB/s ports to combine up to three solid state drives and one hard drive.

Bundled software

While the P8Z77-V Deluxe brings to the table some pretty impressive hardware specs, it can also hold its own in the bundled software department courtesy of ASUS's Ai Suite II. We can't say enough about how useful this compilation of utilities is for troubleshooting and making incremental adjustments to every aspect of our PCs. From TurboV EVO to EPU, ASUS has users covered if they want to max out their hardware's performance or streamline how efficient it operates under various idle and load conditions.

I previewed several of the bundled software applications that came with the P8Z77-V Deluxe and a couple caught my eye like the PC Diagnostics utility shown above. It can be downloaded from ASUS's USA website and is used to troubleshoot and analyze several system devices connected to the motherboard. It helps users collect detailed system information as well as detects and reports physical device errors that can affect system performance. Another critical aspect of this program is it can also perform a simple stress test to find additional errors with the CPU, memory, and display adapters.

On a side note, we were able to use ASUS's sensor recorder application built into Ai Suite II to monitor system voltage changes during idle and load testing. We typically use a Kill-A-Watt power monitor to measure our test bench's power usage, but it was handy to have sensor recorder running in the background to give us realtime data that can help us measure power usage as we run different benchmarks. There is also another tab to monitor CPU and motherboard temperatures, which is another critical piece of information to have at our disposal during the overclocking process.

Pricing

As of Oct. 1, the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe was available at Newegg for $279.99 with free shipping. It is also available at TigerDirect for $279.99 and Buy.com for $282.

Conclusion

We'd like to thank our friends at ASUS for providing the P8Z77-V Deluxe for our review today. There aren't many times during my writing career where I have been left speechless by a board's overall performance and overclocking prowess. I've never seen a board's auto-overclocking features come to life like what I experienced with the P8Z77-V Deluxe during testing. The UEFI BIOS and TurboV EVO software worked in sync like Batman and Robin to put the right overclocking features and system monitoring functions at the user's fingertips. Giving our PC Perspective Gold Award to the P8Z77-V Deluxe was a no-brainer and I hope ASUS continues to push the envelope to bring more innovative ideas and creative motherboards designs and custom utilities to market.

I mean we know Intel wouldn’t certify the ThunderboltEX card but that kind of leave the whole thing up in the air. Were the earlier motherboards released with optional Thunderbolt support advertising on the packaging or manual? If so that could puts Asus in a bad legal situation given their inability to deliver the product.

Does the Zalman CNPS12X Cooler block out the 1st RAM position on this board? It looks like you have the RAM sticks in the blue slots (positions 2 & 4 starting from the CPU and counting away from the CPU) vs. the black slots.